Archive for November 26th, 2008

In the episode “The Boneless Bride in the River” in Season 2 of the TV show Bones, the body of a young woman is found in a river, and it’s discovered that she was likely brought over to the US on a fiancée visa. About 14 ½ minutes into the episode, two of the main characters (Special Agent Seeley Booth and Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan) have this conversation:

Booth: Homeland Security says the fiancée visa was expedited by a lawyer on retainer into a smaller bride agency here in town called “The Perfect Wife”.Brennan: Oh that sounds archaic.
Booth: No, you know, in therapy I learned that superlatives like perfect are meaningless.
Brennan: Not in science.A perfect number is a number whose divisors add up to itself, as in one plus two plus three equals six.
Booth: Well, in therapy I learned that definitive statements are by their very nature, wrong.
Brennan: Isn’t the statement “definitive statements are by their very nature wrong”, definitive, and thus wrong?

Speaking of wrong, Brennan was a little bit wrong in her definition: a perfect number is one whose proper divisors add up to itself. But still, neat math in a neat show is always worth a mention. And perfect numbers are pretty neat, because like so much in number theory they’re simple but there are still open problems about them.

A bit of history [where “a bit” apparently means “a lot because I don’t know how to edit today”]: perfect numbers were studied by Pythagoras, which makes the concept at least 2500 years old. Euclid also talked about perfect numbers a few hundred years later in Book IX of The Elements. In particular, Thomas Heath’s translation of Proposition 36 states:

If as many numbers as we please beginning from a unit are set out continuously in double proportion until the sum of all becomes prime, and if the sum multiplied into the last makes some number, then the product is perfect.

As a translation of this translation, this is saying that if 1+2+22+…+2k is prime, then that sum times the last number in the sum (2k) must be perfect. For example, 1+2=3 is prime so 3·2=6 is perfect. Likewise, 1+2+4=7 is prime, and 7·4=28 is perfect. [As a note, the formula is is sometime written out algebraically with 2k+1-1 used instead of 1+2+22+…+2k; in addition, when it’s written that way it’s sometimes reindexed so that k is used in place of k+1, and the statement becomes “If 2k-1 is prime, then (2k-1)·2k-1 is perfect.”]

A few hundred years after Euclid, Nicomachus wrote some more information about perfect numbers. According to the St. Andrew’s web site, he made
five claims:

(1) The nth perfect number has n digits.
(2) All perfect numbers are even.
(3) All perfect numbers end in 6 and 8 alternately.
(4) Euclid’s algorithm [described above] to generate perfect numbers will give all perfect numbers
(5) There are infinitely many perfect numbers.

Nicomachus’s word was law as far as perfect numbers were concerned, and his claims, while unproven, were believed for decadescenturies a really really long time. Of course, there were only four perfect numbers known at that time (6, 28, 496, and 8128), so they really didn’t have much to go on. In reality, the 5th and 6th perfect numbers (33,550,336 and 8,589,869,056 respectively) disprove claims (1) and the “alternately” portion of (3), but it took a while for someone to discover those.

(Which leads to a little tangent: who did discover those numbers? Ismail ibn Ibrahim ibn Fallus (1194-1239) made a list of ten numbers he thought were perfect. Three of them weren’t, but the other seven were. Sadly, a lot of other mathematicians had no idea about this list: mathematicians in Western Europe had to wait another 350 years for those numbers to enter their collective psyche, during which time a few other mathematicians found the 5th and 6th perfect numbers and were equally ignored.)

But even after it was known that Nicomachus’s claims weren’t themselves perfect (ba DUM!), mathematicians continued to study the numbers. In the 1600s Pierre Fermat tried to find patterns, and ended up discovering his Little Theorem as a consequence. Marin Mersenne also spent some time on it, and in fact his exploration of when 2k-1 is prime, as a part of that theorem of Euclid’s mentioned above, led to the notion of Mersenne primes (primes of the form 2k-1 where k itself is prime).

In the 1700s Leonhard Euler entered the fray. He couldn’t prove that Euclid’s formula generated all perfect numbers, but he did show that it generated all even perfect numbers. And a bunch of other mathematicians spent a lot of time trying to show that numbers were or were not perfect (which was related to showing that specific numbers of the form 2k-1 were or were not prime), a challenging task in the pre-computer days.

Not that we’re doing much better now. As of this moment, we still only know of 46 perfect numbers, and they’re pretty big. We do know a few cool things about perfect numbers in general:

Even perfect numbers end in 6 or 8.

Even perfect numbers are triangular numbers (e.g. 6=1+2+3 and 28=1+2+3+4+5+6+7) where the ending digit is one less than a power of 2.

The reciprocals of the divisors of perfect numbers all add up to 2:

But there’s a lot we still don’t know:

We don’t know if all perfect numbers are even.

We don’t know if there are a finite or infinite number of perfect numbers.